Obama's Congressional Speech

Few people can argue with the eloquence and power that is delivered by President Obama during a speech. I for one could hardly be misconstrued as an Obama supporter, but even I can’t deny his gift of oral communication. The power behind such lines as “We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before” was enough to send a rattle into the homes of the millions of Americans watching. In his speech, he attempted to send a message of hope and reassurance to the American citizens. However with that said, a few things in Obama’s speech were quite questionable to say the least.

Now I realize he may have simply been trying to emphasize the point that America has done great things, but it was purely entertaining to hear him say “I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.” He was referring to the United States and us as Americans not allowing the auto industry to fail by turning our backs on them. His statement was blatantly misleading. Those who are even slightly knowledgeable on the history of the automobile will know that Karl Benz of Germany, not Henry Ford, is credited for creating the first automobile. But we’ll just call this a small faux pas by some speech writer.

But now we need to move on to some of the meatier and even more controversial elements of the Obama speech. Recently, a considerable amount of political rhetoric has been centered on the trillion dollar stimulus bill and the plethora of pork projects sneaking into the small crevices of that massive bill. For this reason, one line in the speech that was particularly salient to me was:

I'm proud that we passed the recovery plan free of earmarks, and I want to pass
a budget next year that ensures that each dollar we spend reflects only our most
important national priorities.

An earmark is a measure placed in a bill that sets aside money for a very particular project. For those of you who may not know, an earmark is the same thing as a pork project. You know, those “little tiny, yes, porky amendments” that Americans are supposedly indifferent to. It simply astounds me to hear Obama discuss anything free of earmarks while Congress is preparing to send him a spending bill with roughly 9,000 earmarks. For some reason, spending $190,000 on the “Digitization of New York Historical Society Collection” just doesn’t appear to be one of our “important national priorities.”

Another particularly disturbing excerpt from the speech comes as Obama is discussing future generations. Ensuring we do not leave a financial burden to future generations was a somewhat major component of Obama’s rhetoric while running for president. This campaign strategy was clearly in response to the enormous deficits accumulated during the Bush years. So in his speech, Obama lays out the hard truth on the table:

There is, of course, another responsibility we have to our children. And that is
the responsibility to ensure that we do not pass on to them a debt they cannot
pay. With the deficit we inherited, the cost of the crisis we face, and the
long-term challenges we must meet, it has never been more important to ensure
that as our economy recovers, we do what it takes to bring this deficit down.

This comes after he worked so diligently to pass the largest spending package this nation has ever seen. This comes after he has warned that we could possibly be spending hundreds of billions more to bailout citizens who have failed to pay their mortgages. How can he possibly keep a straight face while talking about not leaving a colossal debt for future generations to pay off while he himself has already signed and plans to sign even more monumental bills? When is this fiscal responsibility going to kick in and put an end to these irresponsible financial measures?